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Communications

Tools of communication have transformed American society time and again over the past two centuries. The Museum has preserved many instruments of these changes, from printing presses to personal digital assistants.

The collections include hundreds of artifacts from the printing trade and related fields, including papermaking equipment, wood and metal type collections, bookbinding tools, and typesetting machines. Benjamin Franklin is said to have used one of the printing presses in the collection in 1726.

More than 7,000 objects chart the evolution of electronic communications, including the original telegraph of Samuel Morse and Alexander Graham Bell's early telephones. Radios, televisions, tape recorders, and the tools of the computer age are part of the collections, along with wireless phones and a satellite tracking system.

Telegraph keys are electrical switches used to send messages in code. The message travels as a series of electrical pulses through a wire. The exact method of operating this automatic double-current key is unknown at this time. The key may have been used in laboratory experiments at King's College in London investigating submarine telegraph signaling.

This is a commercial version of "Butler In A Box", an electronic home controller system designed by professional magician Gus Searcy and computer programmer Franz Kavan. This unit sold for between $1500 and $3000 depending on the accessories needed to meet a customer’s requests. Butler In A Box required microphones for users’ voice inputs, and different controllers for thermostats, light circuits, alarm systems and telephone access. Aside from sales to luxury-home owners, Mastervoice also marketed the product to physically challenged people who might have difficulty operating traditional electrical switches and controls.

This hand-made circuit board served as the brain for Gus Searcy and Franz Kavan’s "Butler In A Box" electronic home controller. In addition to the various capacitors, resistors and transistors on the board, there are two integrated circuits. The idea was to couple emerging computer technology with novel wireless devices and make a product that could control a variety of electrical devices in a home.

This is the prototype "Butler In A Box", an electronic home controller system created in 1983 by professional magician Gus Searcy and computer programmer Franz Kavan. The idea was to couple emerging computer technology with novel wireless devices and make a product that could control a variety of electrical devices in a home. Searcy reportedly conceived the idea after friends asked him why, if he could pull rabbits from hats, couldn’t he just tell lights to come on instead of physically operating a switch. Soon thereafter, Searcy and Kavan developed “Sidney,” an electronic controller to do that and more.

In 1940 Marvin Camras received an engineering degree from the Armour Institute of Technology and began work at the Amour Research Foundation. The prior year he had constructed a prototype wire recorder with a new type of recording head and adapted the technique of “AC bias” for improved sound quality. AC bias involves adding a high-frequency alternating current signal to the recording that significantly lowers noise and distortion.

During World War II, Armour manufactured U.S. military wire recorders using Camras’s design. General Electric licensed the design and produced a version of the Armour recorder. After the war other companies took licenses from Armour to produce recorders. One such company was Webster-Chicago, this model 181 “Webcor” unit is one of that company’s products. Webster-Chicago’s products did well in the market and the company produced wire recorders into the early 1960s.

This GE wire recorder is a licensed copy of the Armour model 50 recorder designed and made for the U.S. military during World War II. Based on the work of Marvin Camras, Armour fabricated wire recorders at a small, specially-built plant until 1944. The demand for increased production of recorders led GE to begin production of the model 51.

The Armed Forces Radio Service used a variety of recording devices, including wire recorders, to bring programming to troops stationed around the world. This wire recorder used four vacuum tubes and ran on alternating current.

This Message On Hold telephone answering machine was designed for business use. The user would connect the device to their phone line so that an incoming caller could listen to music and messages while their call was on hold. This allowed the business to entertain their callers as well as providing a sales opportunity. This particular unit is an early model made by Bogen Incorporated for DMS Corporation.

This Message On Hold telephone answering machine was designed for business use. The user would connect the device to their phone line so that an incoming caller could listen to music and messages while their call was on hold. This allowed the business to entertain their callers as well as providing a sales opportunity. This particular unit is a production model made by Bogen Incorporated for DMS Corporation.

The origin of magnetic recording can be traced to design work by Oberlin Smith of the United States in 1878. After seeing a demonstration of Thomas Edison’s phonograph, Smith thought about how to record sound using a magnetic medium. After ten years of failing to make a working model, Smith published his idea in the hope that someone else might benefit. Valdemar Poulsen of Denmark read Smith’s idea and in 1898 demonstrated the first practical magnetic recorder, a telephone answering machine he called a “telegraphone.” Various companies sold telegraphones for about ten years but microphone and amplification technology were not sufficiently developed to support the device. Poulsen turned to radio experiments in 1902.

The telegraphone spurred others to continue development of magnetic recording devices. Much early work took place in Germany where the telephone manufacturing firm of Ferdinand Schuchard hired engineer Semi Begun to work on circuit design. Begun became interested in magnetic recording and while working for Lorenz Company helped to design a new answering machine, the “Textophone.” Introduced in 1933, the textophone sold well since it could also be used as a dictating machine.

The Textophone consisted of two units: this telephone desk set, and a recording and playback console. The recording mechanism passed a steel wire from one reel to another in front of an electromagnet that impressed a magnetic field on the wire. When the wire was passed back in front of the electromagnet, a signal was induced in the speaker circuit. The desk set operated as a regular telephone but also includes control buttons for the recorder.

This model BK-416 “Soundmirror” is a modified version of Brush’s model BK-401. Like the earlier unit, the BK-416 used a paper tape coated with a magnetizable material in a reel-to-reel configuration. The retail price in 1953 was about $280, nearly $2300 in 2012 dollars. Working in parallel with Bell Laboratories and the Armour Research Foundation, Brush Development Company spearheaded American research efforts in magnetic recording prior to World War II. Building on the research of Semi Begun, the company made military wire recorders during the war and introduced consumer products like this Soundmirror after the war ended.